What’s Wrong with Romney? His Party is Combusting (Liberation, France)

What does Mitt Romney have to do to make an eventual nomination as a presidential candidate more than just a poisoned chalice? For France’s ‘Liberation’, columnist Fabrice Rousselot writes that winning the general election may require the impossible: Uniting the most radical extremes of the Republican Party behind a moderate message.

Once again, the primaries held in ten states have revealed one thing: a divided party that remains unable to unite behind the moderate former governor of Massachusetts, to the point of pitching dangerously to the right and being attracted by the lure of ultra-conservative Rick Santorum.

While the influence of the Tea Party in Washington has declined, its ability to mobilize voters and be heard on a local level has suddenly united every extreme faction, from anti-government conservatives to Christians to isolationist libertarians.

The fracture is so deep, that even a charlatan like Newt Gingrich, a perfect example of a Washington political hack playing the system for all it’s worth, can now present himself as a “candidate of the base.”

From hereon in there is only one choice for Romney: try somehow to unite a party in dire shape. But the primaries coming up in the South are more likely to favor Santorum, whose level of extremism is hard for the French to assess, but who is capable of saying that JFK’s speech on the separation of Church and State made him want to “vomit.”

This is a party today that would not nominate Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat and President of a union in California as well as Bush 41, a moderate from New England.

Moderates that determine an election will accept a fiscal conservative, but they will not under most any circumstance accept a social conservative that wants to control peoples private lives and dictate moral behaviors.

slamfu

This party is run by a bunch of yahoos that base their ideology on a series of untrue premises and fears. Unable to look at even recent history to see what works and what doesn’t, poor math skills, and very shoddy abstract reasoning, have given us today’s GOP and its platforms.

We can lower taxes and reduce the deficit. This will also create jobs. War with Iran is a what we need to do. Deregulation will help the economy not smash it as large companies game the system to line their pockets at the public expense. We need to spend more on the military, just because apparently. Christians are being persecuted and this really needs to stop. Contraception being included in national health proposals needs to be debated even though 98% of women use it.

It goes on and on, each as silly as the last. Many of their ideas have been tried and found to be really bad ideas. Some are just bad directions to go in for new stuff. And some like spending more on the military just make no sense, as if we aren’t bigger than the next 6 militaries in the world combined. Welcome to the GOP.